We are proud to announce that, as of this month, Stefan Wagner started his professorship for Complex Software Systems at the Department of Software Engineering at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, School of Informatics, Commnications and Media, Campus Hagenberg. Stefan is one of the founding members of this research group and father of the software environment HeuristicLab. The whole team congratulates wholehearted!

Two research projects, proposed by HEAL in cooperation with the School of Management (FH OÖ, Campus Steyr), have been accepted: "TSCHECHOW" and "COVER.core". In TSCHECHOW, opinion mining and bioinformatical text mining shall be researched; research in cost-efficient vehicle routing with constraint relaxation shall be conducted in COVER.core. Both research projects will be funded by the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences and the Government of Upper Austria; in each of these projects two research assistants will be employed for approximately one and a half years: one in Steyr, one in Hagenberg working with HEAL members. Thus, we expect the HEAL team to grow by two members within the next months!

On June 25th, 2009, Professor Dr. Enrique Alba will give a talk at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Campus Hagenberg, entitled "Metaheuristics for Bioinformatics: Gene Selection and Genomics". In this talk Prof. Alba, Professor for informatics at the University of Málaga and expert in parallel metaheuristic algorithms, will explain the use of metaheuristics in bioinformatics. In bioinformatics, metaheuristics are used for solving various kinds of problems in research with genomics and gene interaction, for example. Basic and current research results in this area shall be presented and discussed by Prof. Alba.

We are proude to announce that an article written by members of the HeuristicLab team has been published in Springer's journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (GPEM). The paper "Using enhanced genetic programming techniques for evolving classifiers in the context of medical diagnosis" by Stephan Winkler, Michael Affenzeller, and Stefan Wagner has appeared in GPEM, Vol. 10, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 111-140; this article can be retrieved online via Springer's online portal.